Product Description

Originally appearing in "The Kinky Friedman Crime Club", now published as a single volume, this is the third Kinky Friedman mystery. A purloined feline from Madison Square Gardens' cat show is a tip-off to a trail of murders, drug rings and gang wars that only Kinky Friedman can follow.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #645049 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 183 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Nonstop one-liners, cartoon characters, pointless freneticism and a ridiculous denouement do not a mystery novel make. Country singer Kinky Friedman ( A Case of Lone Star , Greenwich Killing Time ) is back again as his own hero-narrator amateur sleuth. He sallies forth to help a friend whose tabby has vanished from a cat show at Madison Square Garden. A wildcat chase to the Roosevelt Hotel turns up only a note saying, "What's the mattercat got your tongue?" Then the body of a literary agent is discovered in the exhibition hallminus a tongueand the next victim after that is a cat-hating editor. Kinky is shot with a lion-tranquilizer dart by someone wearing a cat mask and wakes up to find a sexy woman sitting on his bed. She is Leila, a beautiful Palestinian-Colombian whose brother is a drug big shot. Kinky eventually finds himself between two warring gangs of lethal Colombians, and there's a bloody shoot-out before the unmasking of the killer. Fans of earlier Friedman mysteries may enjoy the mix of real and fictional characters, Kinky's bohemian lifestyle and some of the one-liners, but the murder solution is so sappy that it wrecks the book. Even cat-lovers will find this hard going.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Genuinely funny fiction is rare, but genuinely funny crime fiction is rarer still. All the more reason, therefore, to celebrate..." -- Sunday Times

"Sometimes he's just outrageous. Most of the time, he's outrageously funny." -- People Magazine

A hip hybrid of Groucho Marx and Sam Spade." -- Chicago Tribune

From the Author
"Mysteries with cats as central characters have become so plentiful and predictable that I can't believe that I've written fourteen and a half of them. I don't kill quite as many trees as the woman who writes The Cat Who Got A Blow-Job, The Cat Who Killed Christ, etc., etc., but I am guilty of purveying the cat upon what I consider to be an essentially non-cat-loving world. I do this to irritate people.

I would also argue that the cat is not so much a character in my novels as it is a conscience. You remember those. A lot of people used to have them in the Sixties. Back then, consciences were really in style. They were almost as popular as cats..."

Customer Reviews

Good but not Kinky's Best
I am a new fan of the politically incorrect, fast-paced detective novels of Kinky Friedman, having previously read The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover. These books are an easy read, with short chapters and constant movement, and Kinky (both narrator and author) occasionally summarizes what the protagonist has learned just to help the reader keep up with the storyline in the unlikely event you become confused.

This time Kinky gets wrapped up in the case of a cat who disappeared from a cat show at New York's Madison Square Garden. This seemingly harmless case soon leads him down the path to murder, warring Columbian drug cartels, and perhaps an ancient sect of dangerous Cat worshippers who are believed by anthropologists to be in the New York/ New England area.

However, none of this really matters all that much. The joy of reading a Friedman novel is simply to come along for the ride as Kinky, his sidekick Ratso, and other "Village Irregulars" like McGovern and Rambam converge in his Greenwich Village apartment (below the ever-present Winnie Katz and her lesbian dance class) or at Carnegie Deli to piece together information and make everything turn out happily ever after. Kinky pokes fun at hockey, golf, publishers, Columbian drug lords, authors, police and virtually everyone else who enters his path with a self-deprecating humor and a knowledge of history. His numerous historical references include such diverse characters as Vincent Van Gogh and Franz Shubert. Clearly the guy has read a few books in his day before he started writing them.

Ultimately, while the novel held my interest and I read it in a single weekend, I didn't think this one was as laugh-out-loud funny as J. Edgar Hoover. Written in 1988, it was Friedman's third novel, and I suspect he was still polishing his style. However, fans of Kinky's offbeat style, (and there are many of them), will find much here to enjoy.

Best Kinky
I have read all the Kinky books, but this one is still my favorite. Since all his books have a "cat theme," this one is really carries it through with a cat show at Madison Square Garden. Great fun.

Not the best Kinky mystery...
Fans of Kinky Friedman's humorous detective fiction will no doubt enjoy this one as well, with many of the characters in place from his first two novels. This time around, the mystery revolves around cats, books and cocaine. Kinky always sticks with familiar territory, and it's like a comfortable shoe for the reader.

A couple of ugly tendencies start poking around in this one, however. Friedman's novels are always filled with people he knows in the real world...from his publishing company, the country music world or just plain old friends. That's sort of charming and folksy, but when he name-drops just for the sake of name-dropping - and the reader has no clue who he's talking about because it's some guy that he went to college with - it gets a little annoying. Several times there are entire pages describing events that seem to advance the story not one bit, only to find out that the mini-story is about his real-life publicist or assistant. I hope his assistant appreciated, because I didn't.

Not to mention that some of Kinky's un-PC rambling (hilarious in the first two books) start to get a little out of hand here. It grows old to hear the same "I'm a Jew so it's okay to drop asides about tar babies, watermelons, and spics," stuff over and over.

That said, it's an average mystery that doesn't pay off the way Kinky's first two books did. I'm not giving up on him, though. Vandam Street, Kinky's cat, the espresso machine, the head and parachute door-opening system and the entire crew that hangs with this Jewish cowboy in the Village keep calling me back for more tales. Although it's a lull in the series, the premise is far from played out.